Case No. ZZ20D49528

But that is not the end of the story. There are vast amounts of future costs in the pipeline. 7.In his further application for a legal services payment order the husband claims around £250,000 for his outstanding costs with his most recent set of solicitors. He also seeks for future costs: i)£79,585 for an appeal hearing against the recent children judgment referred to below of Sir Jonathan Cohen (assuming he gets permission to appeal);ii)£285,095 for a rehearing of the child proceedings (assuming he wins the appeal). This does not include the cost of a prefigured renewed application to recuse Sir Jonathan Cohen from any further dealings with the case;iii)£233,295 being the costs between today and the First Appointment (i.e. to draft a questionnaire and attend the appointment); and iv)£75,533 to enable him to fund his defence to a claim mounted by his former solicitors in respect of unpaid bills.A total of £673,508. And this would only take him up to the conclusion of the First Appointment. 8.The wife does not give figures for categories (i), (ii) and (iv). She estimates that she will spend £96,732 on the Part III claim to the First Appointment. It is reasonable to suppose that if the husband were to be granted permission to appeal the children judgment that the wife would incur costs of the same order as those anticipated by him for categories (i) and (ii). 9.The total future costs of both parties thus range between £330,000 (if permission to appeal is refused) and about £1,135,000 (if permission to appeal is granted, the appeal allowed and the children case reheard).10.The cost of an FDR and a full trial of the Part III claim would probably not be less than £750,000 per side, given the extraordinary rate they have incurred costs at hitherto. So the total future costs are likely to be somewhere between £1.8m and £2.6m.11.Thus, we are looking at the total cost of the litigation between these parties being somewhere between £7.2 million and £8 million, of which £5.4 million has already been incurred.12.Figures like this are hard to accept even in a conflict between the uber-rich, but in this case the wife’s Form E discloses two properties in London each worth about £5 million and a sum of about £11 million in the Coutts account. There are predictable disputes as to the true beneficial ownership of one of the properties and of the sum in the Coutts account. The wife also discloses properties in Siberia worth a little over £1 million. The husband, who has next to nothing in his name, says that this is an entirely false presentation and that the wife is correctly ranked by Forbes as the 75th richest woman in Russia, with vastly valuable interests in supermarkets in Siberia. Even if this were true (and the suggestion is hotly contested) to run up in domestic litigation costs of between £7 million and £8 million is beyond nihilistic. The only word I can think of to describe it is apocalyptic. 13.It is difficult to know what to say or do when confronted with such extraordinary, self-harming conduct. Periodically the judges bemoan the heedless incurring by divorcing parties of huge costs. What was regarded in 1996 as gross costs inflation was the principal driver for the ancillary relief pilot scheme of 25 July 1996: Practice Direction [1996] 2 FLR 368. In 2014 in J v J [2014] EWHC 3654 (Fam), [2016] 1 FCR 3 I exploded with indignation at the rate and scale of costs incurred in that case and solemnly pronounced that “something must be done”. With the benefit of hindsight those costs – a total of £920,000 – now seem almost banal. The rules have been changed so that orders have to record the costs incurred and to be incurred (see FPR 9.27(7)). Para 4.4 of FPR PD 28A has been introduced to try to force parties to negotiate openly and reasonably in order to save costs. Yet costs continue to go up and up.14.In my opinion the Lord Chancellor should consider whether statutory measures could be introduced which limit the scale and rate of costs run up in these cases. Alternatively, the matter should be considered further by the Family Procedure Rule Committee. Either way, steps must be taken.